Wildfire Crisis Strategy Implementer Insights: Perspectives from Across the WCS Investment Landscapes

Background: In January, February, and March of this year, RVCC convened a series of peer learning sessions on the implementation of the Forest Service's Wildfire Crisis Strategy (WCS) together with partners from the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network, the Forest Stewards Guild, the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative, and the Northern Arizona University Ecological Restoration Institute. The series, funded by the Forest Service State Private and Tribal Forestry, focused on perspectives from on-the-ground implementers in WCS investment landscapes, creating space to share challenges and opportunities, generate ideas, and build support networks. We were thrilled to hear that the series also functioned as a space of solidarity and hope building for folks working at the ground level of this monumental and unprecedented effort.

Why this work matters to RVCC: Friends of RVCC will know that the crisis of wildfire in the American West is a pressing and immediate priority for many RVCC coalition members, and for RVCC's staff. In many areas of the West, wildfire is the major threat to the landscapes, communities, and resources that our nation relies upon. RVCC has a long history of work in areas like collaborative forest management and wildfire policy, and we're dedicated to the idea that this crisis can be addressed through collaboration that centers rural communities and holistically supports economies based on stewardship of landscapes and resources. We're honored to have supported peer learning and network development for Forest Service partners and local staff involved in implementing the WCS.

Some main points we heard loud and clear throughout the series:

• While the unprecedented pace and scale of WCS goals are a challenge that implementers need support in addressing, there are promising solutions being discussed and demonstrated across the West. For example, improvements were seen from multiple methods of increasing coordination and communication between different scales of collaboration for strategy, planning, and implementation.

• Balancing priorities developed through overlapping initiatives is essential, and large-scale initiatives that overlap with local initiatives are most effective and durable when they build from those local relationships and priorities.

• While acknowledging that the agency faces constraints stemming from legislative uncertainty and statutory language, many participants wished for more transparency from the agency, citing uncertainty in funding amounts, allocation methodology, and reliability, as significant barriers to sound and efficient decision making, respectful collaboration, and more.

• The WCS is a historic effort in its magnitude and many other factors, but also reflects a common agency strategy of collaborative implementation of national priorities within focal areas in order to achieve landscape-scale impacts. The WCS can benefit from the learnings of other such efforts, and future such efforts can benefit from the learnings of the WCS. Furthermore, real-time opportunities to share and problem solve with peers, transparent accounting of investments, and internal and external feedback opportunities enhance this learning within initiatives, and enable the harvesting of lessons to apply broadly.

Please share this document with anyone who might be interested, and don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions to cole@ruralvoicescoalition.org 

Count for Something: The Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (WTREX)

By Leslie Neu, RVCC Program Manager

Leslie recently attended the 2024 Women-In-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (WTREX) at the Niobrara Valley Preserve in northcentral Nebraska. She shares her unique experience below.

When I was applying to law school, I had the option to write a diversity essay to accompany my admissions package. The intent of the essay was to allow me—a middle-class white woman—the opportunity to express how I would add to the diversity of the law school community. According to the Law School Admissions Council, white students continue to make up the majority of law schools nationwide and woman-identifying students have increased to represent more than half its entering population. How could I add to the diversity of the community?

I expressed this dismay to an admissions counselor and she quickly retorted, “But Leslie, you’re a female wildland firefighter. That has to count for something.” She had a point. Before applying to law school, I had worked for six years as a federal wildland firefighter and, while 72 percent of the federal wildland fire service is white, less than 15 percent identify as female. As an aspiring natural resource professional, my perspective working in this male-dominated field could contribute to the diversity of my new community—but how exactly, I did not know.

WTREX participants in front of the trusty fire engine “Old Grey.”

Photo Credit: Annie Leverich / Fire Networks

Fast forward to today, and I have finished law school and am working in natural resource policy and programing for Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition (RVCC). Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the 2024 Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (WTREX) at the Niobrara Valley Preserve in Nebraska. The WTREX program began in 2016 after a group of women at a traditional Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) recognized their unique perspectives as women in fire. They created the WTREX program as a shared-space for women and other diverse populations to learn and grow in fire management. Since its inception, the WTREX program has hosted or partnered on 11 events in 4 countries with over 1200 applicants and participants from over 30 foreign nations, 35 U.S. states, and 55 Tribes. And demand for the program continues to outpace capacity–of the thousands of applicants, only about 25 percent have been selected to participate.

WTREX participant, Tracy Katelman, using a Panama torch during burn operations.

Photo Credit: Brian Beach / Nebraska Public Media News

The core values of the WTREX program focus on elevating the diverse perspectives of its participants—their cultural, social, geographic, age, employment, and gender diversity. The WTREX program is open to people of all identities, including men. The gendered uniqueness lies in its majority female leadership team. Given the male dominance of the traditional fire workforce, there can be limited opportunity for female-to-female mentorship in the profession. In contrast, the WTREX program offers female mentorship tenfold—of the dozen or so members of its incident management team, only two identified as male.

The diverse 2024 Niobrara WTREX Incident Management Team.

Photo Credit: Annie Leverich / Fire Networks

Another unique feature of the WTREX program is its commitment to creating durable relationships between participants through activities and discussions conducive to connection. Similar to team building, connection creation between people is an important aspect of successful fire management. However, the typical wildland fire “team-building” usually starts and ends in fire operations. In contrast, the WTREX program promotes connection beyond the operational; the WTREX program gets personal. The Niobrara event was one-part prescribed fire training, one-part life skills coaching. In between lessons on fire ecology, burn techniques, and medical response, we were thoughtfully led through sessions on mental health, diversity, power dynamics, and allyship. I learned how to spot the signs of wind and storm patterns in Nebraska and how to spot the signs of mental health decline in myself and my fire colleagues. I learned how fast and dynamic fuels burned out in the grasslands and how poor and ineffective work-life balance can lead to professional burnout in the wildlands. I was confronted with my own biases about diversity in fire management and was reminded of my power dynamics and privileges—my economic status, my race, my sexuality, my fire experience. I was shown how to ground myself in these advantages and use them to serve as an ally for the next generation of fire management.

Participants “blacklining” a burn unit on the Nebraska prairie.

Photo Credit: Annie Leverich / Fire Networks

Looking toward the future, the WTREX program is raising expectations for how diversity can positively influence our future relationship with fire. The program helped show me how, through my unique perspectives and experiences, I add to the diversity of my community. From my experience fighting fires, I saw fire management for what it was—a highly effective suppression team responding to risk. And from my perspective as a woman in fire, I saw fire management for what it is—an often underserved, over-worked, and passionate workforce pushing for change. And as a WTREX participant and policy advocate, I now see fire management for what it can be—a diverse community of compassionate and strong allies for landscape and human resilience. And that has to count for something.

Supporting Collaborative Engagement in Forest Service Project Planning and Implementation

By Emery Cowan, RVCC Program Manager

Emery was the lead author on both of the RVCC learning resources described below, but had help from many Forest Service staff, collaborative group partners, and RVCC colleagues.

The work of collaborative groups and partnerships have always been central to RVCC’s focus on solutions that benefit the health of both rural landscapes and rural communities. RVCC staff are fortunate to work closely with collaborative groups across the West and to develop learning resources to support their work. Along the way, we’ve noticed a few trends among these groups, and forest collaboratives in particular. For one, as more collaboratively planned land management projects move into implementation, we’ve seen forest collaborative groups increasingly exploring ways to engage in the post-planning phase of the project timeline, including activities like on-the-ground project preparation and monitoring. Collaborative groups are also finding ways to bring new resources to land management activities and are contributing valuable perspectives, shared learning, and coordination capacity at a number of points along the project timeline, rather than only during project planning. In light of these trends, we’ve recently developed two companion resources to highlight and support expanded collaborative engagement in Forest Service planning and implementation. 

Forest Service Project Planning to Implementation serves as a reference resource that outlines the major phases of initiating and carrying out forest management actions, including project development, environmental analysis, implementation planning and preparation, contract and agreement development, implementation, and monitoring. Our goal is to promote shared understanding of these processes, better-aligned expectations of project timelines, and more informed conversations about opportunities for collaborative engagement. Partners who are newer to working with the Forest Service may also find this guidebook a helpful primer on the agency’s processes. 

Innovative Collaborative Engagement in National Forest Management in the Pacific Northwest is a companion to the guidebook and showcases examples of how collaboratives are engaging with Forest Service management actions along different parts of the project timeline. Learn how collaborative groups are supporting data collection and surveys, improving the design and offering of timber sales, and supporting monitoring efforts (among many other things!) 

We have also presented these documents to forest collaboratives around the Pacific Northwest and beyond, which have sparked a number of useful conversations. 

• At one collaborative group, the discussion homed in on opportunities to better understand various wood products businesses in the region and use that to inform the design and financial evaluation of proposed commercial projects. 

• During another working session, our introduction of these documents spurred conversation about how steep topography impacted total treated acres within a project footprint and ways the collaborative could support more accurate timber appraisals. 

• At yet another collaborative group meeting, partners said they were surprised and grateful to better understand the reality of project implementation timelines. The discussion also sparked brainstorming about the possibility of an implementation engagement agreement between the collaborative and the Forest Service (read more about that type of agreement on p.8 of this document). 

We are excited to play a small role in kickstarting shared learning and new conversations within collaborative groups. If your group or partnership would see value in an overview of these learning documents, please reach out - we’d be glad to work with you! RVCC staff can be reached at rvcc@ruralvoicescoalition.org.

Pathways to Prescribed Fire: Lessons from Cooperative Burn Partnerships

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published as a guest post for the Fire Adapted Communities Network (FAC Net) blog, and can be found here.

By Becca Shively - Program Manager, Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition

Becca Shively is a Program Manager for Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition and is based in Portland, Oregon. She has a background in federal forest policy and public lands management, and has worked for various agencies in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the City of Portland. Here, Becca shares reflections on a recently completed project looking at what might help scale-up the use of cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofits and the Forest Service in order to accomplish more prescribed fire across the West.

The Background

For the past year I’ve led a project for Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition (RVCC) intended to facilitate cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofit organizations and the Forest Service. While cooperative burning is by nature a more expansive practice involving many sectors and partners, there were several reasons why we hoped to focus on the specific dynamics between these two entities. Nonprofits can face unique challenges in fire work, and have fewer resources and systems available to them than other partner types. They also offer a wealth of local expertise, community engagement potential, and workforce capacity at a time when the Forest Service, and the West, urgently needs to expand its qualified workforce to address our worsening wildfire crisis. It was with these considerations in mind that we embarked on a project to understand the successful strategies that have allowed cooperative burn partnerships to gain traction and propose solutions or agency reforms that would address the most common barriers slowing or preventing their adoption.

The Process

We collected, analyzed and compared 20 executed cooperative burn agreements between nonprofits and the Forest Service. We also interviewed 67 different nonprofit prescribed fire practitioners, agency staff and partners in other sectors about their experiences with federal burn partnerships (once we started, it was hard to stop).

We sought to:

• Gauge the abundance of cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofits and the Forest Service;

• Learn how those partnerships are codified through federal agreement instruments;

• Clarify agency practices and policies, and nonprofit strategies related to fireline qualifications, credentialing and liability; and lastly

• Understand nonprofit and agency perceptions of each other.

The Take-home

The Process

We collected, analyzed and compared 20 executed cooperative burn agreements between nonprofits and the Forest Service. We also interviewed 67 different nonprofit prescribed fire practitioners, agency staff and partners in other sectors about their experiences with federal burn partnerships (once we started, it was hard to stop).

We sought to:

• Gauge the abundance of cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofits and the Forest Service;

• Learn how those partnerships are codified through federal agreement instruments;

• Clarify agency practices and policies, and nonprofit strategies related to fireline qualifications, credentialing and liability; and lastly

• Understand nonprofit and agency perceptions of each other.

The Take-home

What we found in many ways confirmed our original sense of the challenges facing nonprofits in this work. We also clarified the role the agency might play in improving prescribed fire partnership opportunities. We were both encouraged and disheartened by our findings, but ultimately continue to see immense opportunity to expand cooperative burn partnerships through specific steps. To summarize this work we created two products that are available now on the RVCC website – a set of case studies highlighting three nonprofit organizations’ pathways to developing their own prescribed fire capacity and cultivating federal partnerships; and a full report that outlines our key findings, barriers faced and proposed recommendations about cooperative burning in the western U.S.

Here’s a quick download of some key project takeaways:

The Hard Truths

Cooperative burn partnerships between nonprofits and the Forest Service aren’t as abundant as we had hoped. In fact, we didn’t uncover any partnerships that we were not already aware of. In addition, some of the most impactful barriers cited by nonprofit interviewees had no easy solutions, such as:

• The agency’s suppression-oriented structure and culture, which can exclude nonprofits from being viewed as credible partners;

• A lack of agency incentives to invest the resources and time required to develop and maintain partner relationships;

• Limited and poor options for nonprofits to track and certify fireline qualifications; and

• The scarcity of private prescribed fire insurance, sometimes causing nonprofits to withdraw from prescribed fire implementation work altogether.

The Good News

Partnerships lay fertile ground. Despite the scarcity of formal cooperative burn partnerships in the West, the ones that do exist provide far greater impact and engagement. For example, several nonprofits we interviewed use their federal agreements to engage other community organizations as volunteers or agents of their work, fostering dispersed, multi-organization fire crews and planting seeds for future “formal” agency partners. We also identified several agency sparkplugs, including almost all regional fuels managers we interviewed, who were true believers in the impact of partnerships and were supportive of promoting cooperative burning. Finally, we found grants and agreements staff to be very open to clarifying and improving agreement processes and welcomed the opportunity to hear feedback from partners. Overall, there seemed to be a great deal of agreement between both the nonprofit and agency interviewees about the barriers they see to cooperative burn partnerships, suggesting a solid, agreed upon foundation to advance solutions.

What’s Next for this Work?

RVCC will continue to work with partners like FAC Net, The Nature Conservancy, Fire Learning Network (FLN) and our coalition partners to promote an inclusive, collective action approach to meaningful wildfire risk reduction in the rural West, including cooperative burning strategies. With a better understanding of the potential and the limitations of cooperative burn partnerships, we are positioned to prioritize needed solutions and bring these ideas to ongoing conversations about implementing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the new Forest Service 10-year Wildfire Strategy.

In line with that goal, we hope you’ll join us on May 26 for a virtual RVCC Annual Meeting session, “Accelerating the Use of Prescribed Fire through Policy and Partnerships,” co-facilitated by Dr. Courtney Shultz (Colorado State University) and Nick Goulette (Watershed Research and Training Center). In this session we’ll vet the findings and recommendations of several aligning prescribed fire projects, including this one, and co-create a framework of policy priorities that will support cooperative burning and partnership-driven prescribed fire implementation. Registration is open – we hope to see you there!

Note: RVCC’s cooperative burn partnership report and case studies were made possible by generous support from The Nature Conservancy’s U.S. Natural Climate Solutions Accelerator Grant Program.